Friday, April 18, 2014

It is finally dawning on American voters that the United States has turned into a nation controlled by oligarchs. In Florida? Not so much awakening yet.

Depending on the state where you live, the names of the oligarchs change but their motives remain pure to the multi decade efforts to brand themselves as freedom loving citizens whose business interests and profit motives coincide with the people's.

Of egregious examples, Florida Gov. Rick Scott is in a class of his own. With no experience in government or public policy beyond the health care system where his significant personal wealth derived -- Scott bought his way to the Governor's Mansion in Tallahassee four years ago. To rank and file Tea Party enthusiasts -- his core supporters --, Scott seemed the epitome of the principle that the less qualified one is for public office, the more one belongs there.

Even GOP stalwarts were shocked at first by the emergence of a neophyte they had never blessed. Although he side-stepped most of them -- arriving in Tallahassee with scarcely a single advisor with any experience in government -- he found a helping hand from those who need government's help most: the community of Florida oligarchs.

In particular, Scott found favor with Big Sugar billionaires. They -- without explaining or even bothering to inform the new governor -- set about to eliminate environmental rules and regulations and land use planning measures that were the result of decades of hard, brass knuckles dealmaking; a process that had always tilted to their favor. It was not enough. They wanted more. For the legion of lawyers, engineers, and lobbyists whose salaries depend on the oligarchs, doing more is their principle motivation.

With Scott -- the most clueless governor in Florida's modern history -- Big Sugar finally got what it wanted: a governor who would do exactly what they wanted, when they wanted. In nearly thirty years I have tracked public policies relating to environmental protection, the political atmosphere in Tallahassee has never been more poisonous to the public interest than it is today.

The irony in terms of water management -- the key factor in Big Sugar's stream of taxpayer subsidized profits -- is that Gov. Scott was informed everything was fine at exactly the moment everything turned to shit.

The problem had been obvious to anyone paying attention. Water management practices favoring Big Sugar had been wrecking marine life and spreading devastating algae blooms for years through gorgeous estuaries and along the coasts.

The destruction began to accelerate thanks to a season of extraordinarily heavy rainfall in 2012/2013. More to the political point, environmental carnage began to energize GOP voters who had been silent on the sidelines as successive terms (Jeb! Bush) of leadership had piled into Big Sugar's corner.

It is an odd fact of human nature that when it comes to the environment, people don't stomp their feet and pound their fists until the rafters shake until they are literally on the receiving end of nature's fury.

So, at last, with a hotly contested election in sight, Gov. Rick Scott took the unprecedented step (for him) of reaching out to environmental critics who have been elevated in the public esteem for the simple reason: they were right.

So Scott went to visit some of his most prominent critics to hear what he had ignored for three years, rolling the dice that he could salvage support among a core group of GOP constituents whose interest sharply diverge from the Big Sugar oligarchy.

For more, read the OPED in the Treasure Coast Palm and comments by an Everglades scientist, Larry Fink, who has emerged as one of the strongest critics of the anti-environmental agenda of state regulators and the Great Destroyers.

She welcomed the man onto the weathered porch of her Rocky Point home.

She poured him a glass of green tea.

Then Hurchalla, Martin County’s most influential Democrat, gave our Republican governor a talking-to about the Indian River Lagoon like he’s never heard before.

She told Gov. Rick Scott three things during the surprise house call Friday:

• First, water must move south from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades — and locals won’t scream at you if it’s not a River of Grass-style flow way. We just want it done.

“Contrary to popular belief, we don’t care how you send the water south,” said Hurchalla, a former Martin County commissioner and longtime environmental advocate.

• Second, she told the governor, Martin County is not out to destroy Big Sugar.

“It’s not that we are not interested,” Hurchalla said, joking (OK, maybe half joking).

“It’s that they are bigger than we are,” she continued. “We are interested in coexisting — and saving the Everglades at the same time.”

• And third, Hurchalla told Scott, preserving natural land is vital to saving the Indian River Lagoon. We can’t expect engineered solutions to fix everything.

She reminded the governor Martin County residents have taxed themselves to buy huge swaths of land for the Indian River Lagoon South plan — but the state hasn’t lived up to its end of the deal by buying more.

“He was attentive and listened,” Hurchalla told me Wednesday.

There’s one more thing she mentioned, too.

It was about the Scott’s re-election campaign.

“I did tell the governor I’m a Democrat, and I won’t be supporting him,” Hurchalla, the sister of former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, said.

That didn’t stop her from thanking Scott for his role in killing an abusive environmental bill filed by state Rep. Jimmy Patronis, a Republican from Panama City.

The governor’s response: “It was the right thing to do.”

And it didn’t stop Hurchalla from applauding the new effort he’s making to support our local waterways. She was particularly glad to hear Scott supports a $250,000 study by University of Florida’s Water Institute that would find the best plan for moving water south — thereby stopping the releases from Lake O to the St. Lucie River and Indian River Lagoon.

And it’s a stunning shift from last year, when Scott first ignored the crisis in the Indian River Lagoon — then deflected responsibility by claiming it was the federal government’s problem to fix.

In case anyone forgot: This is the same Gov. Scott who was booed during a feel-good visit to Bass Pro Shops in Port St. Lucie six months ago; the same Gov. Scott who refused to face hundreds of sign-waving locals during a stop at the St. Lucie Lock and Dam last year.

Now he’s paying house calls to Martin County’s most respected environmentalists.

The governor also met Friday with Sewall’s Point Commissioner Jacqui Thurlow-Lippisch.

His handsome and charismatic new lieutenant governor, Carlos Lopez-Cantera, joined him. So did Herschel Vinyard, secretary of the state Department of Environmental Protection.

Hurchalla had only been expecting Vinyard for a visit. It was the first time she had personally spoken with Scott.

Despite their political differences, she was willing to see past his transgressions of last summer.

After all, every state politician was ignorant and inadequate on the topic of the Indian River Lagoon then.

“Nobody came up with good solutions,” Hurchalla said. “Everybody blamed somebody else.”

Now, as Gov. Scott’s new house-crashing hobby shows, the most powerful politicians in the state have heard us.

Listening alone won’t save the Indian River Lagoon — but it sure beats being ignored.

We can all agree that we need to dedicate public resources to the paramount public interest in the public health, safety, and welfare, including public works projects that will protect life, limb, and property, consumers, workers, and the public trust, including threatened and endangered species, natural resources and their inherent and aesthetic values, the natural services they provide, and their renewable, sustainable recreational and commercial uses. We have no obligation to support unsustainable commercial uses of the public trust, especially those that are only profitable because of explicit subsidies, including crop price supports and trade barriers, and implicit subsidies, including allowing polluted untreated or inadequately treated stormwater runoff to be discharged to Lake Okeechobee,
the Everglades, or our East and West Coast estuaries.

As presently practiced, sugar cane farming involves the irreversible consumptive use of peat soil and the irrigation water that is not recaptured by the tertiary, secondary, and primary canal networks and localvrainfall. The lost water could be made up with wastewater reuse water,
including the reuse water now being used as a cooling water supply for
FPL's gas-fired power plant that is immediately west of the L-8 Reservoir
Project, which, because of its high chloride and sulfate concentrations,
should be used instead for cooling water supply and thermal equlibration
prior to deep well injection, rather than flushed out with EAA stormwater
runoff for reservoir-assisted STA loading-leveling. The lost peat soil
could be made up by using fallow parcels to dewater hydraulically dredged
Lake Okeechobee sediments. This would also relieve the pressure on the
Herbert Hoover Dike and the IRL, because > 90% of the hydraulically dredged
slurry is water. The shortfall in drinking water for human consumption could be made up with
desalination water obtained using a solar-powered steam distillation.

These are workable proposals with a not unreasonable relationship between cost and benefits that would demonstrate the interest of Big Sugar to coexist with a sustainable Florida future based on sustainable recreational and commercial uses of our fresh and salt water resources. Coexistencerequires symbiosis, not parasitism. Florida's future in general and the Everglades and East and West Coast Estuaries cannot be bought for a few thousand jobs or the free speech and the growing number of politicians bought with those taxpayer-subsidized profits.

Of political necessity, we may have to coexist with sugar cane farming as
presently practiced at great taxpayer-supported profit for the short term
to move an additional 200,000 acre-ft of treated stormwater runoff to the
Everglades sometime in the distant future, but, since the peat soil is a
finite resource, not for the long term. However, I see no evidence that
Big Sugar has any interest in coexisting with the environment and the
people of Florida who depend on it by switching from unsustainable to
sustainable farming practices and internalizing rather than externalizing
its wastes at loading rates in excess of of the solar-powered capacities of
our natural resources to safely assimilate. Instead, they are pushing to
socialize more risk in order to privatize more profit, aided and abetted by
Governor Scott, who shares their philosophy of unregulated access to and
exploitation of our human, physical, and fiscal resources for substantial,
taxpayer-subsidized profit.

That being the case, this is our Neville Chamberlain or Winston Churchill
moment, when we go along to get along and accept the environmental
restoration scraps from the master's table or fight for permanently
breaching the Herbert Hoover Dike with a spillway/flowway acquired through
eminent domain that will save lives and our natural resources, albeit at
the expense of the taxpayer-supported profits from unsustainable
agricultural practices and the few thousand jobs directly related to sugar
cane farming that these now highly mechanized farming practices still
provide.

So who speaks for a sustainable Florida future that restores and protects
all of our human, infrastructure, and natural resources from unsustainable,
consumptive commercial exploitation and irreversible damages, which is
increasingly the fate of the IRL?

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Quotes hall of fame - worth another look:

Jonathon Dunlop of Australia about the Miami Airport:"This is the most disorganized shambles of an airport that exists on this earth.''April 01, 2007 Eye on Miami Comment on Post__________________________________On "Colony Collapse Disorder":Anonymous said...I say lets wait till the last tree is going to be cut down, the last bit of oil used, the last lowland coastal areas flooded before we make any rash decisions that might effect the economy.April 21, 2007 Eye on Miami Comment_________________________________On Bee “Colony Collapse Disorder” being blamed on cell phones:Anonymous said...Hmmm. What are bees doing with cell phones, anyhow?April 20, 2007 Eye on Miami Comment_________________________________On South Florida Water Supply:Ron Littlepage said...Unfortunately, we know who would win when it comes to allowing development to run amok and it's not the wildlife.April 20, 2007 Eye on Miami Comment Post_________________________________Lesley Blackner said:In Florida, the sad reality is that government exists to serve the development machine, not the citizenry. That's why it's proper to say that in Florida we have government of the developer, by the developer and for the developer.April 22, 2007 Eye on Miami Post_________________________________On City of Miami and Miami Dade County giving $1,000,000 each to Jorge Perez’s Related Group (The Group's 2005 revenues were $3.25 billion.):"It makes as much sense as me donating half my paycheck to Warren Buffett.”May 6, 2007 Miami Herald Columnist Ana Menendez_________________________________On the FCAT Test:"'Florida is a serial mis-user of test scores.''Bob Schaeffer, director for Massachusetts-based FairTest.May 25, 2007 Miami Herald_________________________________Clifford Schulman (Greenberg Traurig Lobbyist):"This is the first time in 33 years that any one has accused me of fraud." June 28, 2007 Miami HeraldI say: hmm.__________________________________Max Rameau, Homeless Activist:"I respect Ron Book for his work with the Homeless Trust, but the Liberty City community and others have given broad support to this idea. I don't know that a big-time millionaire lobbyist can tell us what is best for Liberty City and the black community.'' July 28, 2007 Miami Herald__________________________________"After years of mismanagement under a board of political appointees and neighborhood activists, Miami-Dade County administrators have proposed a new way to run the troubled empowerment zone program. The plan: Bring in new political appointees and neighborhood activists."November 6, 2007 Miami Herald: Reporter Scott Hiaasen______________________________________"Saying "Greater Everglades" and "Northern Everglades" is not saying Everglades -- other places are deserving of being protected too, but there is only one Everglades. The main thing is to keep the 'Main Thing' the main thing -- which, lately, has not been the main thing." Bob Mooney - on Listserve "Everglades Commons"________________________________________"Does anyone in their right mind believe that Florida could conduct postal balloting without a major screw-up or scandal? Heavens, no! The whole country is keenly aware that our state is a sump hole of incompetence and corruption."Carl Hiaasen - March 16, 2008 Miami Herald_______________________________________On the Charter Review: "Commissioners want us to vote on their own pet changes, ideas the review team explicitly rejected. And, they're throwing their blatantly self-serving ballot questions at us at the same time. What a slap in the face to the charter review team — and to all of us!" Michael Lewis of Miami Today - April 10, 2008______________________________________On the Miami Dade County Commission:''Unfortunately, this is a commission that would build a cyanide factory next to a playground if you hired the right 12 lobbyists,'' Miami Lakes Councilman Michael Pizzi - May 14, 2008______________________________________"The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats, everybody recognizes that that’s not a smart way to build communities." President Barack Obama in Fort Meyers - February 10, 2009______________________________________"So."Dick Cheney's response when told that two thirds of Americans did not support the war in Iraq. - Time Magazine 2008______________________________________"It seems like a bad idea can always find a home in the Florida Legislature." - Howard Simon - Executive Director of Florida ACLU - March 24, 2010

______________________________________Complete this sentence: South Florida really needs a..."Regional plan for controlled growth (before it becomes a concrete jungle similar to Houston), and a completely new set of elected officials that make decisions based on what's good for the future of South Florida instead of what's good for their wallets. - Jack McCabe, Real Estate expert who predicted the housing boom's end. - August 29, 2011 Miami Herald